User equipment (UE) may include computers, smart phones, cellular phones, laptops, tablet computers, set-top boxes, video game consoles, or other network or graphics display enabled devices. Such equipment may be configured to provide graphics rendering, Internet access, video playback and graphical user interfaces, but may have limited resources (e.g., processor capability, battery life, etc.). The resource limits of equipment may impact the ability of the equipment to provide timely graphics rendering and a smooth user interface (UI) response that is acceptable to users. The complexity of graphical user interfaces (GUI) is increasing, and users are increasingly demanding high quality performance from their equipment. Dedicated graphics acceleration hardware may enhance video playback performance; however not all platforms may currently maximize performance in all situations.
Graphics-related operations in a typical UE may be computationally intensive and may greatly affect overall system performance of UE. Such operations include manipulating images, drawing vector graphics, which are essential to a considerable number of typical usage scenarios such as web-browsing, playing games, displaying photo albums, visual editing tools, etc. These demands may slow down equipment response times, introduce overall system lag or unresponsiveness, and result in a user perception of low quality performance. The failure of UE to handle the performance needs of graphics operations may result in an undesirable user experience and user frustration.